Debian accepts proprietary firmware in major policy change | Hacker News Reader

Debian accepts proprietary firmware in major policy change

zdnet.com

20 pointspabs315 comments

I think this news is more perception than anything else, Debian already allowed non-free, but now is including that in the installer, aligning both, which seems to make sense if only enabled manually after asking the user

But in general seems like an unnecessary identity crises, catering for the wrong user base. Most people can't use Debian stable for daily desktop. In my opinion most of the Debian user base is enterprise and this move does no improvement but causes perception questions. Maybe they will start to consider other options NixOS, Guix, CoreOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora

Anyone could have easily just downloaded the nonfree iso. However, I think it's so very important that we can simply say "Just go install Debian" to anyone just looking for a rock solid OS.

I suppose this will allow Debian to compete against some of its derivatives such as Ubuntu.

I thought that Debian was an Ubuntu derivative /s

(at least by the number of users)

I think support for non free is a major reason for people to chose Ubuntu over Debian, specially with cheaper laptops that come with non standard chipsets. Of course Ubuntu also comes with stronger marketing and people generally (sadly) prefer having a corporation behind software than a charitable organisation.

This decision only affects non-free firmware blobs. Proprietary drivers like Nvidia or Broadcom still have to be installed separately. So I don't think it'll help much in that regard.

There are numerous corporations paying contributors or employees to work on Debian, and supporting Debian in other ways, Canonical for example, or the Debian partners and Debian consultants and most of the LTS team comes from Freexian.

https://www.debian.org/partners/ https://www.debian.org/consultants/ https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Team https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Funding https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Certification https://wiki.debian.org/ExternalEntities https://www.debian.org/intro/help#organizations

Level up from Ubuntu Pro to Debian Pro Max subscription.

Perhaps widely used software should have a toll-free number to call to address faulty product concerns as if food stocked in a grocery store and the consumer's concern is resolved down to the firmware's sourceware line per line with unit testing before and after snapshots given in a receipt the consumer watchdog will be able to use to resolve as a last resort should the consumer fail to make progress with the vendor.

That seems unlikely, since Debian won't be installing the proprietary nvidia driver by default, but Ubuntu makes that easy IIRC.

A bad precedent in my opinion - look at qualcomm blobs on mobile devices. You have no choice and this undermines all mobile security in affected devices.

You already have no choice. While I agree that it's sending a sad message of defeat after such a long time, you either consciously buy "free hardware" anyways, so this doesn't affect you, or you're more of the pragmatic kind and would've installed the non-free blobs anyways after the Installer finished.

It's the qualcomm blobs which are bad here.

Are there projects to attempt to disassemble or reverse engineer wifi blobs? Are they encrypted or for other reasons hard to understand?

There are a few open WiFi firmware projects for ancient chips/standards, one of them is based on reverse engineering, two are from vendors releasing source and the last one is an academic project.

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

Sad to hear, but makes sense given how hard and necessary WiFi firmware is to come by. I guess that just leaves GUIX for the aficionados

Reply on news.ycombinator.com